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A photograph by Dorothy Norman

ALFRED STEIGLITZ——1931

WINGS
VOLUME 8 NUMBER 12
December 1934

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The December Selection
"AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ"
Introduced by Carl Van Doren

THE DECEMBER selection of the Literary Guild is a kind of book which the Guild has not hitherto sent its subscribers. No such book has indeed been written during the Guild's eight years, nor has such a book often been undertaken in any age. America and Alfred Stieglitz, edited by Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg, is an account of an important movement in American art during the past generation, associated with Alfred Stieglitz as its central and fertilizing figure, but extended in all directions to include numerous phases of artistic impulse and achievement.

Readers are familiar with various books which deal with a literary generation in their relations to this or that dominating man of letters. For example, there are numerous books on the Age of Johnson, the Age of Wordsworth, and there will probably be books on the Age of Dreiser or the Age of Mencken. Writers have the advantage over painters or sculptors, or photographers, that their works are multiplied in thousands or millions of copies and their careers and characters generally made known to the public. Painters and allied artists are known on the whole to a smaller public. Their careers do not appear to be closely involved with their works, and the ups and downs of their fortunes belong, so far as general knowledge is concerned, to the region of mystery. What they are not able to say about themselves in their actual works is likely to remain unsaid, and they are not as certain of finding competent biographers as writers are.

Yet there was bound to be, sooner or later, a book on the Age of Stieglitz. To begin with, he is a distinguished artist in his own right, recognized more than forty years ago as a genius in photography. In addition to that, he has had throughout his life an